After war: Post Combat Trauma Stress

I have just started watching Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg’s World War Two miniseries ‘The Pacific’. As a narrative perspective it is easy to conclude that ‘Band of Brothers’, the 2001 series set in the grey clouds of Europe, is better and for many reasons. The war in Europe had its obvious heroes and villains and moral structures of good versus evil. These were typified by acts such as the liberation of Paris to the discovery of the death camps in Hitler’s blood lands. The Pacific war did not breathe the romance of liberating Europe; it was a war of attrition. US Marines launching seaborne assaults on isolated islands in the hope of flushing out a determined and virulent enemy. It was savage and neglected and often distorted by the realms of Hollywood and the denouement in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

We have a Hollywood interpretation of the brutality of war but have time for those who gave their lives for such causes. Yet there appears to be great neglect to those mentally scarred by war. In recent years the National Arboretum was erected in Staffordshire to commemorate the war dead and much publicity and charity has been made of sites like Headley Court, dedicated to help injured soldiers recover after life-threatening injuries. The toils and scars from the death and blasts in World War One are etched in our memories through the poems of Sassoon, Owen and Graves; yet the legacy was vivid in the minds of those who survived the front only to face a hell from within. The British Army identified around 80,000 men suffered from the exposure to such atrocities, many of their wounds would never heal and they ended up in asylums.

Figures show that more American soldiers have committed suicide in the past decade than have been killed in combat in Afghanistan. Post-traumatic combat stress (PTCS), as it has now been identified, has caused countless dedicated men to turn their lives to drugs, alcohol and crime.

It is estimated that around 20,000 veterans are within the criminal justice system and that 10% of the prison population is filled with former soldiers. There is an argument that many members of the armed forces came from the fringes of society and that enlisting, cruelly, was the best way to steer clear from crime, but that would be an indictment on the reputations of many these honourable men.

In the last twenty years, the British Army was involved in Iraq twice, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Sierra Leone; all for varying durations with incalculable risks. Young and inexperienced men are entering situations that are abnormal to society, and expect the things they saw, did and became as normal. Perhaps it is understandable that drugs and crime have become their tonic.

It is now normal procedure for decommissioned battalions, who have just seen combat, to spend a fortnight or so unwinding in places like Cyprus, away from the enemy’s bullet and the banalities of family life. After the Falklands War it was noticed that members of the Parachute Regiment, who flew back home, were more likely to suffer PTCS or commit suicide, than members of the Royal Navy who had a two-week journey back to the UK. It is deemed that this decompression is a vital starting step to let soldiers unwind from months of combat.

War is never glamorous and even the bright lights of Hollywood are reflecting on the trials of soldiers in modern-day warfare. We know the sacrifices made in such theatres are heavy on families and communities, but perhaps it is changing our relationship with mental illness as well. We live in a country where the public no longer accepts or understands the need for long drawn-out wars. Most soldiers would acknowledge and fear the ideas of sacrifice but I daresay many would disregard the scars that come with it.